The present disclosure relates to utilizing a hardware accelerated bridge to accelerate processing of ingress data packets that are destined to software bridged virtual machines.
Hardware and software vendors offer virtualization platforms that allow a single physical machine to be partitioned into multiple independent virtual machines. These virtualization platforms have become accepted in the industry market on a small business level and on an enterprise level. Virtualization technology continues to develop in several directions in order to meet the demands of modern IT applications, such as in network services for multi-tenant environments.
A Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) may be implemented within a virtualized server environment to support communication between virtual machines, a hypervisor, and external network switches. VEBs may be software-based virtual switches, or “vSwitches,” that may execute within a hypervisor, or hardware-based virtual switches executing on a network interface card that, for example, implement a PCI Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) standard.